Certificates

Widevine Content Decryption Module plugin

Widevine is Google's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Content Decryption Module (CDM). It is used to watch premium video content such as Netflix. It is automatically installed when using Google Chrome.

To install it for Chromium, install the chromium-widevineAUR package. Make sure Allow sites to play protected content is checked in chrome://settings/content/protectedContent.

Force GPU acceleration

Warning: Disabling the rendering blacklist may cause unstable behavior, including crashes of the host. See the bug reports in chrome://gpu for details.

Additionally the flag --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds may need to be passed to prevent GPU workaround from being used. Flags in chrome://gpu should state "Hardware accelerated" when configured and available.

Flash Player plugin

PDF viewer plugin

Chromium and Google Chrome are bundled with the Chromium PDF Viewer plugin. If you don't want to use this plugin, check Open PDFs using a different application in chrome://settings/content/pdfDocuments.

Font rendering issues of UTF characters

UTF characters may render as boxes (e.g. simplified Chinese characters). Installing ttf-liberation will allow for the characters to be rendered as expected.

Tab font size is too large

Chromium will use the GTK settings as described in GTK+#Configuration. When configured, Chromium will use the gtk-font-name setting for tabs (which may mismatch window font size). To override these settings, use --force-device-scale-factor=1.0.

WebGL

If you are using Chromium with Bumblebee, WebGL might crash due to GPU sandboxing. In this case, you can disable GPU sandboxing with optirun chromium --disable-gpu-sandbox.

Visit chrome://gpu/ for debugging information about WebGL support.

Chromium can save incorrect data about your GPU in your user profile (e.g. if you use switch between an Nvidia card using Optimus and Intel, it will show the Nvidia card in chrome://gpu even when you're not using it or primusrun/optirun). Running using a different user directory, e.g, chromium --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d) may solve this issue. For a persistent solution you can reset the GPU information by deleting ~/.config/chromium/Local\ State.

Incorrect HiDPI rendering

Chromium will automatically scale for a HiDPI display, however this may cause an incorrect renderend GUI.

The flag --force-device-scale-factor=1 may be used to overrule the automatic scaling factor.

Password prompt on every start with GNOME Keyring

Chromecasts in the network are not discovered

You will need to enable the Media Router Component Extension in chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension.

Losing cookies and passwords when switching between desktop environments

If you see the message Failed to decrypt token for service AccountId-* in the terminal when you start Chromium, it might try to use the wrong password storage backend. This might happen when you switch between Desktop Environments.